September/October 2000 | Contents

15,000 JOURNALISTS IN SEARCH OF... PARTIES?
Waste of Money, Waste of Time -- Let's Invest in Something Meaningful

BY MAX FRANKEL

What possesses a media mob of 15,000 to clamor to cover our quadrennial political conventions? No, not cover, smother. Would a team of 15 learn any less?

It's been four years since Ted Koppel noisily quit the convention scene and challenged the news media to reconsider their definitions of political news and reposition their cameras for a more useful perspective on the long campaigns. But all we've done is spread our inane convention chatter to more cable channels and Web sites, liberating a few more prime-time hours for the networks' ratings and money chase. (Brokaw, Jennings, and Rather all dutifully recorded the politicians' pursuit of corporate bucks at this year's conventions; they just neglected to explain that it is television company cashiers who end up with most of those campaign millions.)

I do not begrudge the media crowd all that expense-paid merriment in Philadelphia and Hollywood (at parties literally exempted by an act of Congress from the customary prohibition on lobbyists' spending for food and drink). But let's call it comp time and not pretend to be doing significant work. As David Broder -- the author, mind you, of the prophetic The Party's Over -- argued in justifying his journey to this summer's rallies, the conventions no longer have any significant function or meaning, and only a diminishing audience, yet: they're "still fun for the political activists and reporters who attend -- a great time to meet, greet and gossip."

Okay. But why spend tens of millions of precious newsroom dollars and television hours to witness nominations that were decided by primary votes many months ago? Why inflate these no-news pep rallies of the faithful and trick the country into thinking something important, even if dull, has occurred?

Ah, goes the reply, it's the country's first "real look" at the candidates. And check out those polls: there's a big "convention bounce" for George, and here comes Al's "bounce," can he even the score? Consider: twelve hours of mostly tedious commercial network chatter time and wall-to-wall PBS, CNN, C-Span, MSNBC, and Fox News to "introduce" the candidates? And to test the public's first and fleeting reaction to their hour on stage?

No, this media mania is mostly reflex and nostalgia. It expresses a longing for a time when power was visibly brokered at conventions among clashing and cooperating forces and egos. It harks back to a time, long gone, when parties chose and hoisted their presidential candidates rather than the other way around and to a time when networks, anchors, and reporters made themselves famous by celebrating the fateful machinations of state and big-city political bosses.

Television and the modern welfare state long ago combined to destroy that convention-centered system. It is in Washington, not in party club houses, that politicians now address most of the needs of citizens. It is in primaries, not conventions, that nominations are won. And it's with television ads and appearances that presidential aspirants seize control of a party's label, slogans, and treasury to sell themselves directly in the nation's living rooms.

So TV is king in our contemporary politics. It makes and breaks candidates -- not only describing but actually designing them. The analysts at conventions, many of them astute students of American history and politics, are thus compelled to behave like fashion reporters, interpreting the smirks, smiles, struts, and body language of the candidates (more shoulder, please, for B but much, much less on G!). And it is largely with purchased television time, and the millions needed to pay for it, that the candidates then compete.

Television stations now gross between $600 million and $1 billion from political advertising even as their news reporting on politics has been reduced to a few seconds a night. So the summer excess of convention coverage serves mainly to cover up that shameful retreat from meaningful news reporting. A show of convention coverage assuages politicians who retain at least a theoretical power to regulate the industry and to demand programming "in the public interest." And the coverage becomes a loss leader, an investment amply repaid by political commercials.

Yet now that profitable entertainment programs are replacing summer re-runs, the broadcasters feel pressed also to keep reducing their convention programs. After all, the number of hours profitably devoted to reporting and analyzing the election of CBS's Survivor -- even on rival networks! -- already surpasses all the political news you are destined to hear before November 7.

This continuing retreat -- to about twelve hours of commercial network time for each convention in August, from nearly thirty hours in 1996 and fifty hours in 1976 -- would be salutary and welcome if the savings in time, money, and energy were redeployed and used to illuminate the unfolding campaigns this fall. But that is not the plan.

Tom Brokaw, whose skybox commentary at the conventions this summer was mostly shunted off to MSNBC's small cable audience, explained sensibly enough that "The parties have drained all the drama out of the proceedings." But he and his corporate masters have not scheduled a compensating round of prime-time documentaries to illuminate the issues that dominate this year's campaign.

Andrew Heyward, the head of CBS News, predicted with good reason that live network coverage of the conventions in 2004 may well be limited to the candidates' acceptance speeches. But he, too, offered no compensating redeployment of his cameras to more meaningful political debate.

And in the opinion of Jeff Zucker, the shrewd executive producer of NBC's Today, even niche coverage of the conventions on cable channels may be "a colossal waste of time and money" because "great drama and great television and great journalism are built upon conflict." True enough. But surely a medium that knows how to entertain us with the infantile maneuvers, jealousies, and competitions of a few adventurers on a distant island can find drama in America's endless experiment in self-government, locate the tension among those who win and lose from foreign trade, sort out the rival claims of credit for this decade's prosperity, track down the causes of our catastrophic failure in the thirty-year war on drugs. Programs that pursue these themes and compel responses from the presidential candidates and leaders of Congress would not cost much more than the $10-$15 million spent by each network in Philadelphia and Los Angeles. Nor would a few free minutes of candidate face time every evening in October require as much air as was squandered on prancing delegates and skybox prattle in August.

Armed with only a single remote, I squandered most of my own August consuming the political coverage on the networks and cable channels while reading randomly in a few newspapers and taking an occasional walk on the Web. Even for a political glutton, the screen offered a mostly indigestible diet. For reasons of either economy or modesty, the networks fielded all too little independent analysis of their own and felt compelled to cover up the dull doings on each convention floor with the repetitious, often ill-considered and grating chatter of paired partisans. (They kept revolving like suitcases on an airport carousel, wrote John Carman of the San Francisco Chronicle.)

The anchors and their political experts -- most notably Tim Russert, Chris Matthews, Jeff Greenfield, Mark Shields, and Paul Gigot -- are themselves far more thoughtful and experienced observers of the political wars than the dueling duos they imported to help fill the empty stretches. Carville and Bennett, Kemp and Cuomo, North and Begala, Kondracke and Barnes made the weekly McLaughlin Group sound like a Quaker meeting.

So the audience shrinks and the shrinkage becomes pretext for ever less political coverage. Yet without the help of creative television producers and reporters, the public cannot possibly come to understand the debates about antimissile missiles. (I caught part of a mid-convention lecture on C-Span by Senator Joseph Biden opposing missile defenses and felt greatly enriched by perspectives I had never encountered in any other medium.) Unless tutored by the minds that invented a West Wing or Seinfeld, how can the public ever grasp the complexities of Medicare coverage or Social Security bookkeeping? Only the major television producers possess the imagination and talent to make the voters' choices important and interesting -- the essence of news.

But the corporate masters of television have failed to set aside the necessary personnel and resources to program for the public interest. And Congress, with the mindless support of both Republican and Democratic administrations, has relieved the industry of all legal and even moral obligations to repay the public for the profitable exploitation of a public asset, the broadcast spectrum.

Thus ensconced in their old-fashioned glass booths, the television anchors are left without the means to produce truly instructive political narratives. No one ventured to teach us in attractive ways why the Middle West states are endlessly mentioned as this year's "battleground." No one explored the evolution of the vice president's office and precisely what Al Gore accomplished in that office. Surely the most annoying cliché was the judgment that Richard Cheney added "gravitas" to the Republican ticket, but no one probed his accomplishments as Secretary of Defense.

Both Cheney and Joseph Lieberman were battered on the Sunday talk shows preceding their nominations for vice president as rival research departments strained to find conflicts between their past positions and the demands of their new situation. But in all the badgering I heard not a word about a subject that could well make a movie: the common and indeed commendable evolution of points of view among politicians who rise from parochial and regional duties to national office. FDR and balanced budgets. Nixon and China. Johnson and civil rights. I have seen no TV segment about how the pressures of public opinion shape a political career and what circumstances cause office holders to bend beyond even conscience.

Of course, politicians hide their conversions and deny unsavory compromises. But games of "gotcha" on Meet the Press or Face the Nation, whatever their headline value, do little to educate the public in the political facts of life. Some such education could occasionally be heard midst all the convention chit-chat from Michael Beschloss and Doris Kearns Goodwin. But their expertise in past presidencies did not really extend to the nominees at hand.

Besides, like most other convention commentators, they were soon exhausted from their syndication on multiple channels; my remote could barely keep up with the peripatetic Ms. Goodwin, who on at least one occasion did not finish a thought begun on PBS until she popped up moments later on MSNBC.

Is it any surprise that the audience for conventions keeps shrinking even as the population grows? About 15 million households watched on the networks, a few million more on PBS and assorted cables. C-Span, the full-text channel, faithfully satisfied the podium worshippers and paid commendable attention to policy discussions on the convention perimeters. All the rest shuttled from rostrum to floor to skybox to the protest in the streets with voice-overs that rarely rose above the banal. That political combat need not be so tiresome on the screen should be evident in the creative and colorful ways our networks have learned to cover the Olympics, the World Series, even Monday Night Football.  

Not the least of television's sins is its Pied Piper misdirection of other media. Of the approximately 15,000 credentials issued at each convention, only about 4,000 went to 150 radio and television organizations. About 5,000 other badges went to daily newspapers and 1,500 more to periodicals, plus 600 to photographers and photo editors. It is a ludicrous assembly of people whose main mission is to assert their presence (and maybe help their bosses obtain invitations to the better parties). But it will not end until the cameras are turned off.

Although Johnny Apple reported at the start of the Republican convention that George W. Bush himself considered them an "anachronism," The New York Times fielded a delegation of seventy writers, editors, photographers, and technicians and filled five or six pages each day, mostly, I would guess, for the stimulation of other news teams. As the paper might have guessed, its best political stuff during the conventions were political biographies, voter interviews, and campaign finance exposés carefully reported and composed far from the madding crowd.

Times reporters turned up each night on Koppel's Nightline, as did Washington Post reporters on MSNBC, to briefly promote their next day's articles. Though generally poor performers, the reporters and their newspapers may benefit from such advertising, but their appearances only underscored the lack of comparable enterprise by the companies that own the cameras.

The stars of the Times and Post also took cameo roles on assorted Web sites, sharing their own gravitas with the conventions' new toys. The champ, surely, was Howard Kurtz, reporting on the media and on media covering media in the Post, on the Web, and on MSNBC with such scoops as John McCain's recall from the airport to join Bush on stage during the Republican balloon drop. At more newsworthy events, this kind of diversion of journalistic energy should be worrisome indeed. It forces reporters who are capable of thoughtful analysis and gifted prose to give hasty priority to time-sensitive bulletins and casual Internet chatter. The result is a confusion of roles and diffusion of talent that ought to be resisted by print editors. Whatever the Web may have to offer journalism in the future, for the moment it is mainly a distributor rather than creator of important information. Let it hire its own runners.

What then did at least a few of the 15,000 manage to convey?

They reaffirmed the conventional teaching of American history that primary campaigns tilt to the right until it's time to woo the center in the general election. They confirmed that the inexperienced George Bush will offer himself as a man of fresh vision whereas the highly experienced Al Gore will stress his accomplishments and competence. It took no skybox to figure out that Bush would avoid his father's mistake of choosing a running mate who was ill-prepared to serve as president or that Gore would favor one who moved him a few degrees from his president.

Indeed, it was no revelation to anyone sitting comfortably at home that Bush was eager to turn his back on the radical right firebrands who ruined his party's last convention and that Gore's problem was not Clinton's sins but the president's charm and oratorical genius. A dozen variations on these themes were tolerable. Thousands were nauseating.

Max Frankel is the former executive editor of The New York Times. He was also the former head of the Washington bureau and former editor of the editorial page at the Times. He is the author of The Times of My Life and My Life with The Times.